Governments have choices to make: subsidize LNG, remove bridge tolls or support public education

Children are starting the school year under a shadow of labour uncertainty. With the first day of the 2019-2020 academic year now behind us, teachers, children and their parents are wondering if and when contract negotiations will conclude or whether they will once more break down and lead to another strike.

Let’s be very clear, governments have choices to make. In the lead up to the 2017 election campaign, the BC Greens made public education our top priority. Our fully costed platform offered more than $4 billion in new funds over four years in support of this priority.

The BC NDP’s priorities are different. They have so far committed billions of dollars in subsidies to the oil and gas sector in an attempt to deliver what Christy Clark couldn’t — a single LNG facility. They have committed  billions to build the Site C dam whose electricity will be sold at a massive loss to this single LNG provider. And they decided to forego billions of dollars of future revenue by removing the tolls on the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges.

The BC Green 2017 platform promised to:

“Increase funding for schools, beginning in 2017/18 at $220 million and rising to $1.46 billion in 2020/21, to allow schools and school districts to invest in every child and prepare students for the 21st century economy, and to invest in innovation and technology. This is in addition to the $330 million committed by the BC Liberals to address the recent court ruling on class size.”

Public education is the foundation of any modern society. The BC Green party believes fundamentally in the importance of intergenerational equity and a preventative rather than reactive approaches to problem solving. For example, you will hear a lot about the struggles with the fentanyl crisis and young adults. Governments are good at funding “harm reduction projects” (reactive) but often don’t realize that prevention is just as critical. How many of our social problems today have arisen as a direct consequence of children growing up over the last dozen or so years without access to the services they needed to succeed (as these services were often the first casualties of the cuts to public education)?

The data from Statistics Canada are also very clear. BC Teachers are some of the lowest paid in the country. BC’s starting teacher wage is the second lowest in Canada (behind Quebec) and even after 10-15 years of experience, our BC teachers remain well behind most of the rest of Canada in terms of compensation. This wage gap is even more significant when one considers the cost of living in British Columbia, and in particular its urban areas, relative to the rest of the country. How can we expect to attract and retain the best and brightest to the profession if we are not willing to compensate them accordingly?

The BC Green public education platform extended beyond substantively increasing compensation for teachers and improving the support services for teachers and students. We further promised to:

1. Provide $10 million per year to restore funding for adult secondary education upgrading and language training
2. Direct $35 million into nutrition and physical activity programs to promote learning readiness, and improve student health.
3. Invest $140 million over three years to train teachers to deliver the new curriculum.
4. Work with Indigenous leaders, teachers, universities and colleges to develop policies and strategies to attract the brightest and best to the profession, and support recruitment. Special attention will be paid to increasing the number of Indigenous teachers and to incorporating more content on Indigenous culture into the curriculum.
5. Review the funding model for the K-12 education system with a view to ensuring equitable access for students. This will address targeting funding to schools with the greatest need and increasing local autonomy regarding funding priorities and distribution.

Imagine my surprise when I found out last spring that government was putting forth some of essentially the same proposals in contract negotiations that the former government did in 2014. In particular, the BC government tabled language regarding larger maximum class sizes and fewer specialty teachers. On May 27, 2019 I rose in the legislature during Question Period to ask the Minister of Education what he was thinking in doing this. I further asked what the Minister thought this would do to the morale of B.C. teachers given that starting in 2002 and culminating in the landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision on November 10, 2016, the BCTF fought hard to restore provisions regarding their ability to bargain class size and composition. In fact, the teacher’s had historically given up wage increases in order to ensure class size and compensation language was included in collective agreements.

Unfortunately, while government has changed, labour uncertainty and unrest in the public education sector continues.

Back in 2014, I wrote extensively about the then labour dispute between the BCTF and the BC Liberal government. It began with a detailed piece offering a path forward for BC public education. A quick keyword search of this site with “BCTF” reveals numerous additional posts discussing mediation, arbitration, the government’s negotiating tactics and myriad other issues.

In my April 2015 second reading speech to Bill 11 – The Education Statutes Amendment Act, seven months after the end of the last teachers’ strike, I provided a more extensive analysis of my views on the importance of public education. Bill 11 aimed at unilaterally allowing government control over the professional development of teachers, and empowering government to issue directives to school boards that they would be bound to follow. In that speech I stated:

At the end of the strike last fall the government spoke about “an historic six-year agreement…which means five years of labour peace ahead of us.” Rather than viewing this as five years of simmering anger waiting to boil over when the negotiations next begin, we should be capitalizing on this time to envision bold new ways of ensuring our educational system is sustainable.

This includes teachers being fairly compensated and adequately supported with properly funded curriculum and learning resources. Such support must include sincere and meaningful class size and composition discussions and support that recognizes that teacher burnout affects us all. It must include reinvigorating our educational infrastructure and ensuring that children have textbooks and access to learning materials.

On Thursday the B.C. Court of Appeal will release its decision concerning the rights of teachers to negotiate conditions around class size and composition. Rather than allowing this to serve as a catalyst to incite increased tension between the BCTF and the government, perhaps both parties will recognize the opportunities that will arise from mutual collaboration, no matter what the Court of Appeals decision is.

For example, perhaps there is a compromise on class size and composition negotiations. Why don’t the BCTF and the B.C. government both agree, for example, that the best place to negotiate class size and composition is at the local school district level?

Rereading my “path forward” and “Bill 11” posts reminds me of how little has changed since the BC NDP have taken over from the BC Liberals. When it comes to public education, the BC Liberals and the BC NDP appear to be two sides of the same coin albeit with different colours.

To conclude, governments make choices all the time as to where to invest public resources. The BC Greens made public education ($4.022 billion over 4 years) our top priority and we remain committed in this regard.

As I mentioned at the start, the BC NDP’s priorities are different. They have so far committed billions of dollars in subsidies to the oil and gas sector in an attempt to deliver what Christy Clark couldn’t — a single LNG facility. They have committed  billions to build the Site C dam whose electricity will be sold at a massive loss to this single LNG provider. And they decided to forego billions of dollars of future revenue by removing the tolls on the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges.

Government’s make choices. And now you see what those choices are.